this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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If all electric cars are just going to be subscription bullshit, I'm sorry, I won't be driving electric.
Even ICE manufacturers have been including hardware that software disabled for a while
I got an OBDeleven for my 2015 GTI so I could unlock stuff and customize. Enabled rolling down the windows with the key fob, being able to display the engine oil temp in the dash and also setting the accelerator pedal curve to linear.
What I didn't even know that was stuff you could even do
The accelerator curve is really cool. A lot of modern cars just have a sensor that detects your pedal position and a simple algorithm decides how much power to translate that into. It's like adjusting the mouse speed on a computer. Feels like you're driving a different car.
Having said that, the default curve is often the best curve. They put a lot more effort into getting it right than you would.
Kinda depends on the car. Volkswagen cars are pretty "hackable" with OBDeleven which is a wireless interface for the hilariously named "VAGCOM" protocol.
Hang on, have I being saying this wrong for years? I thought it was OBDII or OBD2 ?
It is OBD2, OBDeleven is a Bluetooth dongle you plug into it
Almost every car company does something similar and has as long as they've had on board computers.
VW/Audi/Porche are all the same company and generally share the same electronics. A lot of gauges and features are considered "premium" so they just disable them for VW branded vehicles. There's also regional feature lockouts; IIRC North American VW's can't have their fog-lights and headlights on at the same time but you can enable it through VAGCOM.
Subscribe to enable your BMW seat heater! They definitely require periodic software updates and is absolutely NOT a blatant money grab
Audi had been doing this for years and they even disable stuff if you sell your car to another private person. One of my friends bought a used Audi and everything was disabled so he installed a cracked version of the infotainment software and now the only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint unlock.
A fingerprint unlock on a car? I've never heard of that, is it to unlock the doors?
I recently read about 2 or 3 cars doing the whole user your fingerprint to unlock doors and start the car thing. This is one of the reviews I read
https://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/41690/how-the-2022-genesis-gv70-removes-all-need-for-a-car-key
It uses your fingerprint to start.
Probably used for user profiles for the seats and stuff and Aircon. Mercedes does it too
Don't know: there is a fingerprint reader on the handle of the car but it doesn't work
There are some manufacturers that do not do this garbage, or at least not often. I've heard good things about Hyundai specifically.
For now they have customer goodwill to win back after nearly a decade of building cars that practically fell apart in a year or 2 in the late 00s and early 10s.
They'll catch up to the others in anti-consumer practices soon, but for now they're a good choice if you don't particularly care for performance or ride quality.
It won’t just be electric cars, it’ll be all new model cars from manufacturing companies. At least until ICE is phased out.
More like, until the Chinese weasel their way into the US market with cheaper-than-used cars to undercut the legacy auto makers. 10 years or so, it'll happen. And the big 3 will be begging for bailouts again. That is unless they smarten up and remember what made Ford what it is today.
American can-do spirit, worker's rights, and throbbing fuckloads of antisemitism.
I don't see that happening. The US puts large tariffs on imported cars to stifle competition. That's why if you look at Japanese cars in Japan or German cars in Germany they're often much cheaper and more powerful than their American counterparts.
German cars in Europe also seems to last pretty decently where as American-made German cars apparently keep falling apart after 5 years lol
They're already doing that in some parts of the world. Then when they get sizeable market share, they emulated what the previous car makers do. It's just not an improvement. It's more of the same, only the manufacturer is different.
Yeah. GM's subscription nonsense is for their ice cars too. BMW's aborted seat heater thing was too.
Cory Doctorow has written a great article about this phenomenon a few days ago: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
Basically we move back to a feudalism world where you don't own anything anymore and you have to pay recurring rents. And as you don't own it they can fuck you over by increasing rents or disable features when you can't pay.
This is why I keep an oldish diesel car with no extra electronic features in my garage. No weird features, and can still run even without a battery.
Although, I think the reason I kept the car is because of my paranoia of an EMP event frying electronics.
Yeah that's true. I wonder if the market for older cars has been going up yet.
Have you seen the automotive industry as of late? This isn't a EV issue nor is it really new. We've had things like OnStar for years and the entire industry has started to chase the gaming industry's microtransaction BS for a while now.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-remote-start-into-a-subscription-service
The future looks like a potential live service hell scape for the auto industry EV or otherwise.
Everything is being ruined. It feels like hyperbole but I'm not sure it is.
Yes, I know it's industry wide. What I'm saying is that with EV being the future of cars I don't want them all to be subscription based.
I have a Rivian and it works great with no subscription. The only thing you can add via Sub is a hotspot, which seems reasonable to me.
I'm okay with being charged a monthly subscription for something that has an ongoing cost, like mobile data. So long as I can still hotspot my phone and access 'premium connectivity' features over wifi, that is.
Yeah about those 'premium connectivity features'... one of them is warning you that the road you're about to drive on has a traffic jam. And no, you can't have it use your phone's internet connection and you also can't do CarPlay or Android Auto.
For me real time traffic isn't a premium feature or an ad on. It's table stakes. And it should be free. Worse, not having it already almost makes your car hard to sell secondhand. Imagine what it'll be like several years ago when people start selling Rivians?
I agree, I do think they should allow both aa/cp, and wifi while driving so you can tether to your phones wifi. I'm not as doom about secondhand sales as you seem to be though.
It's not just the mobile data that's spendy, it's the API calls to the vendor(s) they're getting that data from.
Android Auto/Car Play would be nice, but having used both, the native Tesla nav is better.
At some point, there will be practically nothing else to drive...
All the more reason to support public transportation.
Sure there will, always. Fix it yourself jalopies aren't going away. Get yourself a cheap-o used junker and mod it to be electric, if you can't or won't use ICE. DIY isn't just 3d printers and FOSS. Or get a bicycle and mod it into an e-bike.
All these upgrades are one time payments for an upgrade, much like sales point dealer add-ons for conventional cars. However recently they did allow you to buy a monthly subscription to FSD. But the option to buy it outright was always there, and still remains.